Mandate on mushrooms in Calaveras County

Saturday

Aug 22, 2009 at 12:01 AM

MURPHYS - A wild-mushroom vendor and the manager of the Murphys farmers market say they are dismayed by a Calaveras County Environmental Health Department order halting the sale of wild-harvested mushrooms at the Thursday afternoon market.

Dana M. Nichols

MURPHYS - A wild-mushroom vendor and the manager of the Murphys farmers market say they are dismayed by a Calaveras County Environmental Health Department order halting the sale of wild-harvested mushrooms at the Thursday afternoon market.

"I think it's a tragedy," said Eric Taylor, manager of the market and also a produce grower who sells there. "I hope we can work through it. I think they are an important resource for people, and they are a really great local food."

County officials say they were simply enforcing state law and ensuring the safety of food sold to the public when they told vendor Gabe Bridges of Avery in early August that he could no longer sell wild mushrooms at the market.

"Mushrooms being gathered on forestland is not an approved source," said Brian Moss, director of Calaveras County's Environmental Management Agency, which oversees the Environmental Health Department. Similarly, a person who gathers wild food rather than growing it on land he or she controls is not a producer and cannot be certified under California law, Moss said.

The mushrooms at markets debate has been simmering for decades, at the same time that California and other states to the north have developed an industry of people who commercially gather wild mushrooms in national forests and Bureau of Land Management areas.

"I actually got kicked out of the farmers market ... about 20 years ago because of this," said Eric Schramm, owner of Mendocino Mushroom Co. in Fort Bragg. Schramm's company now ships about 60,000 pounds a year of wild-harvested mushrooms, including lucrative matsutake mushrooms to Japan.

A survey of farmers market managers around California found that markets in different regions handle wild foods differently. In some cases, foods such as wild-caught fish and wild mushrooms are strictly banned, while in other cases they are allowed, although sometimes through a legal loophole.

The Southland Farmers Market Association, which operates more than a dozen markets from Los Angeles to San Diego, worked out a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" mushroom policy after Los Angeles County health officials in 2005 initially banned wild mushrooms at markets, Southland Executive Director Howell Tumlin said.

"The compromise that was reached in Los Angeles County was that the vendors would continue to sell, ... but they had to post signage saying the mushrooms were not an agricultural product," Tumlin said. Also, the wild-mushroom vendors had to move to the non-certified part of the market usually relegated to crafts booths, bakers and sellers of packaged foods.

The Pacific Coast Farmers Market Association, which operates farmers markets in and near the Bay Area, including one in Tracy, allows wild fish sales but bans wild mushrooms. The mushrooms can't be in the certified area, because they don't come from an approved source, and they can't be in the non-certified area, because mushrooms are an agricultural product, said Thomas Dorn, a farmers market manager for the Pacific Coast association.

The manager of farmers markets in Stockton and Lodi did not respond to a call asking for comment.

Market managers say they understand health officials' concern that an incompetent mushroom gatherer might poison his or her customers. But mushroom industry people say poisonings involve children and amateurs, and they've never heard of a poisoning from a commercial mushroom source.

"You can go into the local grocery stores and buy the same mushrooms," Bridges said. "So I don't know how it got its approved status."

Mushroom advocates said state rules haven't prevented wild fish from being sold in groceries throughout the state.

Meanwhile, Bridges said he's looking for ways to get back into the mushroom business, including cultivating shiitake and oyster mushrooms - which could then be inspected and certified by the county - or even buying from a wholesaler.